Everything is open to question. Nothing is sacred.

Critical and cultural theory invites a rethinking of some of our most basic assumptions about who we are, how we behave, and how we interpret the world around us.

The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader brings together 29 key pieces from the last century and a half that have shaped the field. Topics include: subjectivity, language, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, the body, the human, class, culture, everyday life, literature, psychoanalysis, technology, power, and visuality. The choice of texts, together with the editors' introduction and glossary, will allow newcomers to begin from first principles, while the use of unabridged readings will also make the volume suitable for those undertaking more specialized work. Material is arranged chronologically, but the editors have suggested thematic pathways through the selections.

Everything is open to question. Nothing is sacred.

Critical and cultural theory invites a rethinking of some of our most basic assumptions about who we are, how we behave, and how we interpret the world around us.

The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader brings together 29 key pieces from the last century and a half that have shaped the field. Topics include: subjectivity, language, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, the body, the human, class, culture, everyday life, literature, psychoanalysis, technology, power, and visuality. The choice of texts, together with the editors' introduction and glossary, will allow newcomers to begin from first principles, while the use of unabridged readings will also make the volume suitable for those undertaking more specialized work. Material is arranged chronologically, but the editors have suggested thematic pathways through the selections.

Anyone who has paid the entry fee to visit Shakespeare's Birthplace on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon-and there are some 700,000 a year who do so-might be forgiven for taking the authenticity of the building for granted. The house, as the official guidebooks state, was purchased by Shakespeare's father, John Shakespeare, in two stages in 1556 and 1575, and William was born and brought up there. The street itself might have changed through the centuries-it is now largely populated by gift and tea shops-but it is easy to imagine little Will playing in the garden of this ancient structure, sitting in the inglenook in the kitchen, or reaching up to turn the Gothic handles on the weathered doors. In Shakespeare's Shrine Julia Thomas reveals just how fully the Birthplace that we visit today is a creation of the nineteenth century. Two hundred years after Shakespeare's death, the run-down house on Henley Street was home to a butcher shop and a pub. Saved from the threat of an ignominious sale to P. T. Barnum, it was purchased for the English nation in 1847 and given the picturesque half-timbered facade first seen in a fanciful 1769 engraving of the building. A perfect confluence of nationalism, nostalgia, and the easy access afforded by rail travel turned the house in which the Bard first drew breath into a major tourist attraction, one artifact in a sea of Shakespeare handkerchiefs, eggcups, and door-knockers. It was clear to Victorians on pilgrimage to Stratford just who Shakespeare was, how he lived, and to whom he belonged, Thomas writes, and the answers were inseparable from Victorian notions of class, domesticity, and national identity. In Shakespeare's Shrine she has written a richly documented and witty account of how both the Bard and the Warwickshire market town of his birth were turned into enduring symbols of British heritage-and of just how closely contemporary visitors to Stratford are following in the footsteps of their Victorian predecessors.

This book brings the study of nineteenth-century illustrations into the digital age. The key issues discussed include the difficulties of making illustrations visible online, the mechanisms for searching the content of illustrations, and the politics of crowdsourced image tagging. Analyzing a range of online resources, the book offers a conceptual and critical model for engaging with and understanding nineteenth-century illustration through its interplay with the digital. In its exploration of the intersections between historic illustrations and the digital, the book is of interest to those working in illustration studies, digital humanities, word and image, nineteenth-century studies, and visual culture.

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

"Never Say Never" is a novel about the lives four young women of a colour whose friendship dates back to childhood. It presents the story of how their lives emerged from early adolescence into adulthood. Never Say Never enhances your life with new friends who seem like old ones. Though the future can be surprising, we find out in this intriguing novel that with our surprises and often with life disappointments are many special blessings. You may be confronted with the fact that you did a lot of the things that you said you "never" would do, and sometimes you paid a stiff price for keeping some of those "never" vows. We also discover that some people in our lives and history, who were thought to be ordinary, ended up being extraordinary champions and heroes as we have an opportunity to reflect on their character and accomplishments through the window of time. Yet, through it all, life has some tremendous surprises. Yes, I keep moving to "we." That's exactly what happens as you read Never Say Never .; you find your place within the context of this powerful novel and experience the strong relationships between the characters to the very end.
Dr. Victoria B. Ensley-Walton
Author of The Transformation Connection and The Poet Speaks of Life
This book contains some adult and language.

The book examines military paintings in France in the 1850s and 1860s, when the genre experienced a new lease of life. It recreates the paintings' art-historical, historical and social context, and considers the explosion of military subjects in their own right rather than as a consequence of war reporting. The paintings' entertainment value effectively communicated political agendas, catering to the emerging phenomenon of mass spectatorship and giving rise to innovative compositions. The book also looks at the other side of the artistic spectrum, proposing that smaller formats adapted the sentimental techniques of military memoirs to focus on the soldiers' experiences of warfare and to elicit a critique of war.

The Victorians Were Image Obsessed. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry. Technological advances enabled the Victorians to adorn with images the pages of their books and the walls of their homes. But this was not a wholly visual culture. Pictorial Victorians focuses on two of the most popular mid-nineteenth-century genres--illustration and narrative painting--that blurred the line between the visual and textual. Illustration negotiated text and image on the printed page, while narrative painting juxtaposed the two media in its formulation of pictorial stories. Author Julia Thomas reassesses mid-nineteenth-century values in the light of this interplay. The dialogue between word and image generates meanings that are intimately related to the Victorians' image of themselves. Illustrations in Victorian publications and the narrative scenes that lined the walls of the Royal Academy reveal the Victorians' ideas about the world in which they lived and their notions of gender, class, and race. Pictorial Victorians surveys a range of material, from representations of the crinoline, to the illustrations that accompanied Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Tennyson's poetry, to paintings of adultery. It demonstrates that the space between text and image is one in which values are both constructed and questioned.

Is seeing a matter of nature? Does perspective show things as they really are? Can we read an image in the same way as a text? Reading Images draws together essays that attempt to answer these questions but in a variety of ways and from the different theoretical positions offered by psychoanalysis, semiotics, poststructuralism and postmodernism. The anthology opens up a dialogue between seeing and the seen, text and image, theory and practice. By discussing a range of visual material, from advertising and architecture to painting and photography, it crosses generic and disciplinary boundaries and suggests ways in which vision and visuality are related to questions of textuality, subjectivity, race, and gender.